Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, spent $70 million to buy ai.com, the highest price publicly paid for a website domain, the Financial Times reported.
The acquisition signals the executive’s move into artificial intelligence, a sector that will reach nearly $1.5 trillion in global spending by 2025, according to Gartner. The push will intensify this year, with Bloomberg reporting that the four largest US tech giants alone, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, plan to invest a total of $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
The transaction, completed in April 2025, was made entirely in cryptocurrency, the Financial Times said in its report on Friday, citing Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com, who brokered the transaction. The price more than doubled the previous record of $30 million held by Block.one’s purchase of Voice.com in 2019. Block.one is the owner of CoindDesk’s parent company Bullish (BLSH). Marszalek spent $12 million to acquire crypto.com in 2018.
Ai.com announced the debut of a consumer platform with autonomous AI agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, these agents are designed to operate on behalf of a user, executing tasks such as trading stocks, managing calendars, and automating workflows. Marszalek said the platform aims to be the “gateway to AGI” through a decentralized network.
“We are in a fundamental shift in the evolution of AI as we rapidly move from basic chats to AI agents that actually do things for humans,” Marszalek said. “Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents that self-improve and share these improvements with each other.”
The platform announced its debut with a Super Bowl LX commercial on Sunday, generating a surge in traffic that crashed the website for several hours. Writing in
